In today’s world, consumers expect a tailored customer experience from the brands they do business with. They expect those experiences to be helpful, enjoyable and relevant. Why is that? More and more companies are providing personalized experiences across digital and in-person channels — beyond just the first few brands that may come to mind like Amazon, Netflix and Spotify. And as more companies provide unique and personalized experiences, the more obvious it becomes when a company does not. This is true across industries. Consumers don’t just compare their experiences from bank to bank, insurance provider to insurance provider, brokerage firm to brokerage firm. They compare against all the experiences they have.

We just released a new eBook which explains why personalization is an imperative for financial services institutions and provides 15 great examples of personalization in action. I’ll provide three of those use cases here, but be sure to download the eBook for much more detail!

Display Relevant CTAs Based on Lifecycle Stage

Different people come to your site with different goals in mind. Some visitors might be in the early stages of research, while some might be further down the funnel. Some might be new customers looking to get started, while others might be long-term customers. There is no reason to treat each of these visitors in the same way.

Dynamically modifying your CTAs to promote different actions depending on where a visitor is in her journey is an easy way to be subtly relevant to your visitors and make the most of the real estate on your site. For example, the CTAs in the hero image of the homepage example below change depending on where the visitor is in his lifecycle. New visitors may see a “How It Works” button and relevant navigation options (“Learn,” “Apply,” etc.)...

Highlight Relevant Resources Across the Site

As a content marketer myself, I know how frustrating it can be to create content that you think will be valuable to your audience, but that doesn’t seem to be getting any views. The problem may not be that the content missed the mark. Rather, it may just not be easily discoverable by the right people.

Content recommendations across your site can improve discovery and engagement with your content assets even when someone is not specifically in the blog or resources section. Of course, those recommendations will be most effective if you recommend content assets that are most relevant to each person based on all the data you know or infer about them — stage of life, topic preferences, products used (if they are customers), etc. For example, this site below recommends content on the homepage that is related to a person’s interests — in this case, content related to renter’s insurance rather than messages about home insurance.

Appropriately Time and Target Upsell/Cross-Sell Messages

Your customers are just that — customers. They have already invested in their relationship with you. They don’t want to feel as though you think of them as just a prospect for more sales.

Rather than promote additional products or services randomly to your customers (which will annoy them), you should use data to deliver smarter and better-timed promotions. You can do this by leveraging your CRM data to learn what products the customer doesn’t already have, and using behavioral tracking to gauge interest in other specific products or guides. For example, when an auto insurance customer shows interest in a home insurance offer, this site recognizes his intent and presents an offer for bundling auto and home insurance. This allows the site to illustrate a key benefit of selecting its insurance over a competitor’s.

Final Thoughts

The notion that personalization is a key aspect of the customer experience is taking hold across industries — and financial services and insurance marketers are following suit. This post has provided three examples of personalized experiences for financial services and insurance companies. To find more examples and learn more about why personalization is an imperative for the financial services and insurance industries, download the eBook, The Personalization Imperative for Financial Services and Insurance.